Unwin wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve. The messenger would go directly to Lamech’s office on the thirty-sixth floor and discover Lamech dead. That relieved Unwin of the responsibility of reporting the fact himself.
“A clerk,” said Emily thoughtfully. “It’s the perfect cover, sir. Criminals will naturally underestimate a common clerk, never suspecting that he could be their undoing. And you already look the part, if you don’t mind my saying. Since your subterfuge must prevail within the Agency, as well as without, I assume this is an internal affair. No wonder you’re the one they got to replace Detective Sivart.”
Emily rose from her chair and gestured toward the back of the room. Her nervousness was gone now—her virtuoso performance at the typewriter had restored her confidence. “Sir,” she said, “allow me to conduct you to your private office.”
There was a door behind the desk, painted the same drab color as the walls—Unwin had failed to notice it before. Emily led the way into a room sunk in greenish gloom. Its dark carpeting and darker wallpaper gave the impression of a small clearing in a dense wood, though it smelled of cigar smoke.
The single window offered a much better view than those on the fourteenth floor. Through it Unwin could see the rooftops of the tightly packed buildings in the old port town and beyond them the great gray splotch of the bay, where smoke from ships mixed with the rain. This was the view Sivart would have turned to gaze upon while writing up his case notes. Down there, near the water, Unwin could just make out the dilapidated remains of Caligari’s Carnival, which had served for years as Enoch Hoffmann’s base of operations. Strange, Unwin thought, that the detective could see the lair of his adversary from the comfort of his own chair.
But then, Hoffmann had not been heard from in a long time—not once in the eight years since The Man Who Stole November Twelfth—and the carnival was in ruin. Could it be that Sivart was gone as well? Unwin remembered discovering, in some of the detective’s reports, inklings of plans for retirement. He had been careful to excise them, of course—not only were they extraneous, they were tendered gloomily, when a lull between cases put Sivart in a dour mood. They appeared with greater frequency after November twelfth, and Unwin supposed he was the only one who knew the toll that case had taken on Sivart. I was wrong about her, he had written, meaning Cleopatra Greenwood. And it was true—he had been.
Sivart’s plan involved a home in the country somewhere and the writing of his memoirs. Unwin had been surprised at the detail of Sivart’s description: a little white cottage in the woods, at the north end of a town on a river; a slope covered with blackberry briars; a tire swing; a pond. Also a trail that led to a clearing in the woods. A nice place to take a nap, he had written.
Unwin knew that Sivart might never have found his way to that cottage. Something terrible could have happened—why else a corpse on the thirty-sixth floor?
As though sharing in Unwin’s thoughts, Emily said, “There’s no official explanation regarding his disappearance.”
“Is there an unofficial explanation?”
Emily frowned at that. “Sir, there is no such thing as an unofficial explanation.”
Unwin nodded, swallowing against the dryness in his throat. He would have to be careful with his words, even when speaking to his assistant.
Emily switched on the desk lamp, and now he could see a wooden filing cabinet, chairs for visitors, empty bookshelves, and a decrepit electric fan in the corner. He set his briefcase on the floor and sat down. The chair was too big for him, the desk absurdly expansive. He put the box containing his badge and pistol next to the typewriter.
Emily stood before him, her hands clasped behind her back, waiting. What would she do once she perceived that his clerk’s identity was not a cover? The scent of her lavender perfume, mingled with that of Sivart’s cigars, tickled Unwin’s nostrils, made him dizzy. He tried to dismiss her with a polite nod, but Emily only nodded in reply. She had no intention of leaving.
“Well,” he said, “I trust you have undergone standard Agency training, as well as any training requisite to your particular position.”
“Of course.”
“Then you can tell me what I might expect from you at this time?”
She frowned again, only now the look was darker, more wary. Unwin understood that his assistant had been looking forward to this day, her first on the job, for a long time. He risked disappointing her. It would be dangerous, Unwin thought, to disappoint her.
She changed her mind about what was happening, though, and appeared suddenly pleased. “You’re testing me!” she said.
She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, as though to read something imprinted on the backs of her eyelids. She recited, “ ‘On the first day of a new case, the detective shares with his assistant whatever details he feels the assistant ought to know. Typically this includes important contacts and dates, as well as information from related cases called up from the archives.’ ”
Unwin sat back in the enormous chair. He thought again of that corpse upstairs, bloated with mystery. He felt as though the thing had crawled onto his back and would drag him into the grave with it if he did not throw it off. What was the case Lamech had meant for him? Whatever it was, Unwin wanted nothing to do with it.
He said, “I see that you have a subtle mind, Emily, so I can trust you. As you suspected, this is an internal affair. The case before us, number CEU001, concerns the very reason for my presence here. Our task is simple: to find Detective Travis T. Sivart and convince him to return to his job as quickly as possible.” He was forming a plan even as he spoke it. With Emily’s help, perhaps, he could pretend to be a detective just long enough to bring Sivart back to the Agency. Then he could make sense of the watcher’s corpse, of Miss Truesdale’s long-stemmed roses, of the phonograph record he had found in Lamech’s office.
Emily was all business now. “Clues, sir?”
“No clues,” Unwin said. “But then, this was Sivart’s office.”
Emily checked the filing cabinets while Unwin searched the desk. In the top drawer, he found, forwarded according to Lamech’s demands, his personal effects: magnifying glass for small type, silver letter opener presented to him upon the completion of his tenth year of faithful service to the Agency, spare key to his apartment. The second drawer contained only a stack of typing paper. Unwin could not resist: he withdrew several sheets and rolled one of them into the typewriter. It was a good model, sleek and serious, with a dark green chassis, round black keys, and type bars polished to a silvery gleam. Thus far the typewriter was the only thing Unwin liked about being a detective.
“Empty,” Emily said, “all empty.” She had finished with the filing cabinets and was moving on to the shelves.
Unwin ignored her and checked his margins, adjusted the left and right stops (he liked them set precisely five-eighths of an inch from the edges of the page). He tested the tension of the springs by depressing, only slightly, a few of the more important keys: the E, the S, the space bar. They did not disappoint.
He pretended to type, moving his fingers over the keys without pressing them. How he wanted to begin his report! This, he might start, and lead from there on into morning, yes, This morning, after having purchased a cup of coffee, but no, not the coffee, he could not start with the coffee. How about I? From I one could really go anywhere at all. I am sorry to have to report would be nice, or I was accosted by one Detective Samuel Pith at Central Terminal, or I am a clerk, just a clerk, but I write from the too-big desk of a detective, no, no, I would not do at all, it was too personal, too presumptuous. Unwin would have to leave I out of it.
Emily was standing in front of him again, out of breath now. “There’s nothing here, sir. The custodian did a thorough job.”
That gave Unwin an idea. “Here,” he said, “let me show you an old clerk’s trick. It’s something of a trade secret among the denizens of the fourteenth floor.”
“You have done your homework, sir.”
&n
bsp; He was happy for a chance to impress her, and perhaps to win her confidence. “In an office as busy as the one on the fourteenth floor,” he explained, “a document occasionally—very occasionally, mind you—goes astray. It is lost under a cabinet, maybe, or accidentally thrown out with someone’s lunch. Or, as you have just reminded me, cleared away by the overzealous custodian.”
Unwin opened the lid of the typewriter and gently prised loose the spools of ribbon. “In cases such as those,” he went on, “where no carbon copy is available, there is only one method for recovering the missing document. Impressed upon the surface of the typewriter ribbon, so faintly that only close examination under a bright light will reveal them, are all the letters it has ever marked on paper. This ribbon here is only slightly used, but Sivart must have done some work with it.”
He put the ribbon into Emily’s hands. She drew a chair closer to the desk and sat down, while Unwin angled the lamp to provide her with the best possible illumination. She held a spool in each hand and stretched the ribbon between them, her big glasses shining in the lamplight.
Unwin removed the paper he had just rolled into the typewriter and took a pen from his briefcase. “Read them to me, Emily.”
She squinted and read, “ ‘M-U-E-S-U-M-L-A-P-I-C-I-N-U-M.’ Muesum Lapicinum? Is that Latin?”
“Of course not. The first letter on the ribbon is the last Sivart typed. We’ll have to read it backward. Please proceed.”
Emily’s nervousness returned (better that, Unwin thought, than her suspicion), and her hands shook as she continued. Twenty minutes later those hands were covered with ink. Unwin typed a final copy, separating the words where he imagined spaces ought to be.
Wednesday. I’m putting aside my designated case in favor of something that’s come out of left field, even though it’s probably a load of bunkum. As for protocol, stuff it. I think I’ve earned the right to break the rules now and then, assuming I know what they are. So, clerk, if you ever see this report, may it please you to know I’ve been contacted by atypical means—over the telephone for cripes sake—by a party previously unbeknownst to me, to whom I am apparently beknownst. I mean, he knew my name. How did he get my number? I don’t even know my number. He said, “Travis T. Sivart?” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “We have much to discuss,” or something of that bodeful ilk. He wants me to meet him at the cafe of one of our finer civic institutions. Maybe Hoffmann’s behind it. Maybe it’s a trap. One can hope, right? Thus concludes my report for the day. I’m off to the Municipal Museum.
Once he had read the report twice, Unwin handed it to Emily. She read it and asked, “Could the telephone call have had something to do with The Oldest Murdered Man?”
Unwin ought to have guessed that she would be familiar with Sivart’s cases, but to hear his own title spoken aloud by someone he had only just met—someone not even a clerk—caused him to shudder. Emily seemed to take this as discouragement and lowered her eyes.
Still, he had to consider the possibility that Emily was correct, that the telephone call did have something to do with the ancient cadaver in the museum, with the case consigned to the archives thirteen years ago. He thought of the note to Lamech he had found in the dumbwaiter: Let sleeping corpses lie. What if the Miss P. who had offered that advice meant that corpse, that file?
It did not matter. All Unwin had to do was find Detective Sivart, and now he knew where Sivart had gone. He picked up his new badge and rubbed its face with his sleeve. In the burnished Agency eye he could see his own distorted reflection. Charles Unwin, Detective. Who had inscribed those words? He took the clerk’s badge from his jacket pocket (no gleaming frontispiece there, only a worn, typewritten card) and replaced it with the detective’s. That, at least, would help him if he encountered Screed again. And the gun? The gun went with his old badge into the desk drawer. The gun he would not need.
Emily followed him to the outer office. He took his coat, hat, and umbrella from the rack, waving off her assistance.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m off to the Municipal Museum,” he said, but the situation seemed to call for some words of encouragement, so he adapted something he had seen in Agency newspaper advertisements. “We have a good team here, and the truth is our business.”
Emily said, “But we haven’t rehearsed and codified any secret signals, for use in times of duress.”
He glanced at his watch. “I’ll let you choose something, if you think it’s necessary.”
“You want me to come up with something right now?”
“It was your idea, Emily.”
She closed her eyes again, as though better to see her own thoughts. “All right, how about this? When one of us says, ‘The devil’s in the details,’ the other must say, ‘And doubly in the bubbly.’ ”
“Yes, that will do nicely.”
Still she squinted behind those enormous lenses, out of worry or irritation or both. Unwin would have to find something for her to do, an assignment. The phonograph record in his briefcase was a Sivart file of some kind and could be of some use to him in his search. He said, “I have a job for you, Emily. I want you to find a phonograph player. The Agency must have one somewhere.”
He did not wait to see if this was enough to placate her, and turned to go. His hand froze on the doorknob, however, at the sound of movement on the other side of the door. A shadow loomed in the window, but no knock came. An eavesdropper. Or worse: they had already found Lamech’s body and come to question him.
Unwin cautioned his assistant with a nod and set his briefcase down. The interloper was tapping the glass now, very lightly, as though to send a secret signal of his own. Unwin raised his umbrella saberwise over his head and threw the door open.
The man on the other side toppled backward onto the floor. Black paint spilled from a bucket in his hand, splattering over his clothes, his chin, and the polished wood floor. He held his paintbrush over his head, to protect himself from the anticipated blow.
Unwin lowered his umbrella and looked at the freshly painted words on his office window. DETECTIVE CHARLES UN, it read, and that was all it would ever read, because the painter stood, stabbed his brush into the bucket, and walked back toward the elevator, muttering.
Detective Screed’s door opened. He saw the puddle of paint, saw the black boot prints that trailed down the hall. He yanked the handkerchief from his jacket pocket as though to begin cleaning the mess but put it to his forehead instead. He slammed his door closed again.
“Emily,” Unwin said, “send a message to the custodian, please.”
He stepped over the paint and went down the hall, his shoes squeaking. Other office doors opened, and other detectives peered out at him. Among them were the two he had seen in the elevator with Detective Screed. Peake was the name on one door, Crabtree the other. They shook their heads at him as he passed, and Peake—still scratching the rash at his collar—whistled in mock admiration.
FIVE
On Memory
Imagine a desk covered with papers. That is everything
you are thinking about. Now imagine a stack of file
drawers behind it. That is everything you know. The trick
is to keep the desk and the file drawers as close to one
another as possible, and the papers stacked neatly.
Unwin pedaled north along the dripping, shadowed expanse of City Park. There were fewer cars on the street now, but twice he had to ride up onto the sidewalk to pass horse-drawn carriages, and a peanut vendor swore at him as he swerved too close to his umbrella-topped stand. By the time Unwin arrived at the Municipal Museum, his socks were completely soaked again. He hopped off his bicycle and chained it to a lamppost, stepping away just in time to avoid the spray of filthy water raised by the tires of a passing bus.
The fountains to either side of the museum entrance were shut off, but rainwater had overflowed the reservoirs and was pouring across the sidewalk to the gutter. The place had a cursed
and weary look about it—built, Unwin imagined, not to welcome visitors but to keep secrets hidden from them. He fought the urge to turn around and go home. With every step he took, the report he would have to write explaining his actions grew in size. But if he were ever going to get his old job back, he would have to find Sivart, and this was where Sivart had gone.
Unwin angled his umbrella against a fierce damp wind, climbed the broad steps, and passed alone through the revolving doors of the museum.
Light from the windowed dome of the Great Hall shone dimly over the information booth, the ticket tables, the broad-leafed potted plants flanking each gallery entrance. He followed the sound of clinking flatware to the museum café.
Three men were hunched over the lunch counter, eating in silence. All but one of the dozen or so tables in the room were unoccupied. Near the back of the room, a man with a pointed blond beard was working on a portable typewriter. He typed quickly, humming to himself whenever he had to stop and think.
Unwin went to the counter and ordered a turkey and cheese on rye, his Wednesday sandwich. The three men remained intent on their lunches, eating their soup with care. When Unwin’s food came, he took it to a table near the man with the blond beard. He set his hat upside down next to his plate and put his briefcase on the floor.
The man’s stiff beard bobbed while he worked—he was silently mouthing the words as he typed them. Unwin could see the top of the page curl upward, and he glimpsed the phrases eats lunch same time every day and rarely speaks to workfellows. Before Unwin could read more, the man glanced over his shoulder at him, righted the page, and frowned so that his beard stuck straight out from his face. Then he returned his attention to his typewriter.
Despite all that Unwin had read of detective work, he had no idea how to proceed with this investigation. Whom had Sivart met with, and what had transpired between them? What good did it do to have come here now? The trail might already have “gone cold,” as Sivart would have put it.